What is Keyword Research?

Ah, the infamous keyword research. When creating content for your website the goal is to make sure people see it. You want to make sure that your site is returned to the user when they put in their search term. You do this through keyword research. The challenge is that there are many large corporations in your industry writing about the same keyword topics you are trying to rank for. Understanding how users use search engines, how search engines find your content, and how to write searchable content is a value to your digital marketing efforts.

Using a combination of a strong SEO strategy and understanding how a keyword topic search can help boost your digital content.

How people use search engines and keywords

Understanding how people use search engines is key to know how to best maximize your content for search. When people use search engines, they are trying to identify, clarify, or explore the use keywords that best describe their need. Not everyone uses the same keywords or phrases to search for answers to their question. When search engines look for content that best answers the given keywords in a search, it looks at how those keywords are used in the context of your content.

Instead of writing content that is full of redundant keywords, write quality content that uses specific keywords to maximize its usefulness. Search engines want to make sure that they are providing the best answers to user’s search terms. Google is powerful enough to weed out the sites that use certain keywords but don’t produce content that maximizes the use of those terms. Google also uses the use of synonyms and context to help answer the search that Google predicts is being asked.

How search engines find your content

As you are reading this, there are web crawlers scrambling all over the internet. They are used to search through sitemaps, website design, links, and on-site content. Web crawlers analyze, organize, and comprehend data about each and every website. The web crawlers help organize the web by indexing websites and content. This helps add organization to the internet, so when it comes times to answer a search query, the best content is presented first. Everyone wants to be the first result or at least the first page of results. There is a combination of factors that go into the ranking of websites. Web design and SEO also play a key role in the content ranking.

When using Keywords keep them specific and precise. Using too many keywords clutters what you are actually writing about. Use the keywords that best describe the actual core of what your content is related to. Think how someone would search to find your content.

Search algorithms

When someone types in a search term, there are certain keywords that are used help identify content to search for. This means that in search engines use algorithms to determine what you are searching for and to search for what you are actually searching for. Search engines can use context and a range of other resources, to determine what other people searching for that term also found useful. These algorithms are always being adjusted by search engines to make sure that when someone is searching for something that the most relatable content is being presented.

The use of keywords helps identify your content to be better evaluated by search algorithms. If you are using a keyword incorrectly or giving inaccurate information, your content could be flagged and not presented as a search result. This can result in loss of traffic, revenue, and industry credibility.

Maximize keyword research when writing content.

Keywords play a part in a few different aspect of your digital marketing efforts. How do you go about finding the keywords that work best for your audience, content, and brand? There are two really useful resources that are available to research keywords. Moz and Google both have powerful keyword planners. These planners help you understand what people are searching, how often they are searching, and how much they are used. These are key things to understand because competing with keyword use with a large industry leader, is going to take a lot of work and money. Keyword planners help show monthly search volume data, the difficulty of some keywords, and estimated click-through rate. A keyword planner like Google also predicts the cost of running advertising with that keyword.

If you know that you can get competitive results with certain keywords, you need to know how you are going to use them. You don’t want to use the keywords too much because it looks like spam. The web crawlers will be able to identify that and will flag your page.

Keywords are best when used in titles, subheadings, image descriptions, links, and urls. These are ways that content is organized on your site, and a good way to be clear in describing the content. Title and keywords are strong indicators that the content will be relevant information to a specific search query.

Content needs to really be able to dive into your keywords. Take a look at the top results for your keyword search. What is the content that they are producing? How is their content working for them, that you are not doing? Keep in mind that successfully executing an overall digital marketing strategy incorporates things like search engine optimization, social media optimization, paid digital advertising and content management. Using the most optimal keywords are ways to make sure the right content is getting to the right viewer.

Web trends help find creative ways to use keywords

Examining top trending search results gives you an opportunity to find creative ways to distribute content to similar topics, events, or top news. Google trends is an easy way to identify what people are searching for now. If that fits with your customers there are some creative opportunities to get engaging content out to your followers.